From the Stump

Nice to see bison back here

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Sunday April 21, 2013 6:21 AM

First, get one thing straight. Never call them buffalo. They are bison. Their scientific name is
Bison bison. That should make it perfectly clear.

Buffalo are the water buffalo that live in Africa and Asia. Bison are the animals that now graze
at Battelle-Darby Creek Metro Park. There are 16, all of them are cows, including the biggest one
that is called Big Mama. She tips the scales at 1,400 pounds.

I recently attended a meeting of a natural-history club I belong to during which John Watts, the
Metro Parks resource manager, talked about bison. I was particularly interested in what Watts had
to say about the historical aspects of bison in North America and what now is Ohio.

He said that bison once extended over a tremendous portion of North America from the East Coast
west to the Rocky Mountains, south to Texas and New Mexico and north to Great Slave Lake in Canada.
It’s generally thought they were scattered throughout the Ohio country.

There might have once been some subspecies of bison in North America, but the only species that
remains is the plains bison, and they almost became extinct.

The last bison was killed in Ohio in Lawrence County in 1800, and there were only 1,091 in the
entire country by 1890, Watts said. But there could be as many as 500,000 now, he said.

Alder was captured by American Indians as a boy in Virginia and was brought back to the Ohio
country, where he lived with them in the late 1700s. He later had a cabin along what is now Rt. 142
in Madison County.

In one part of his journal, Alder said the Indians had gone to their winter camp at Hog Creek
north of what is now Wapakoneta.

“Some of the hunters went as far south as Big Darby and Paint Creek,” he wrote. “Here they
killed deer, elk, buffalo (his word) and bear in great numbers and dried and jerked the meat and
returned with as much as they could carry, which was no small quantity, for an Indian can carry a
larger load of provisions than any other people I have ever seen.”

In another part of his journal, he described an incident that happened while he was still a boy.
He said the Indians had just killed a bison and were preparing to carry the meat back to camp.

Without seeing the animal, Alder volunteered to carry the head, but when they took him to the
bison, the head was so massive that he could not even lift it. The Indians delighted in teasing him
about that.

The descriptions of bison in Alder’s journal show that the animal played a part in everyday life
when Ohio was still a wilderness. It’s nice to have them back in one of our Metro Parks.